CD Writer

A CD-RW drive is installed on the IBM Intellistation (pc1). This drive allows users to create their own CDs in various formats. It will read and write both CD-R and CD-RW media. If CD-R (CD Recordable) media is used, the data can only be written once. CD-RW (CD Rewritable) media allows users to use the disk over and over again, rewriting over the data.

The advantage of the CD-R media is lower cost and also you can use the disks with most standard CD players. CD-RW media costs more and doesn't work in many CD readers. The capacity of both media types is about 650 MB.

To take advantage of the drive, we have the Adaptec DirectCD and Adaptec EasyCD Creator software installed. When you load a disk into the CD-RW drive, the software will try to try to determine what type of disk is in the drive. If you loaded unformatted media, the a dialog box will be presented asking you what type of CD you wish to create. The software is largely self-documenting. Contact help@msi.umn.edu if you problems using it.

One of the options that the DirectCD software will give you is to create a CD that you can use like a floppy, ie copy and delete files from the desktop. It should be noted that this format is not very portable. Similar software needs to be installed on other workstation on which you plan to use this disk. For maximum portability, the disks should be formatted with the ISO9660 format.

It is often useful to create a CD "image" of the files you want to save before you write it out to disk. To do this on an SGI workstation, use the mkisofs command. For example, if you want to write the contents of my /scratch/joeuser/data directory to a CD image, you could use this command:

cd /scratch/joeuser; mkisofs -r -o data.img data/